You don't have to wait until you can get to a computer to check what's on at The Astor Theatre!
Our web-site has now been optimised as far as possible for display on the small screens of handheld devices such as mobile 'phones and connected PDAs that have web-browsing capabilities.
In truth, there was not a great deal that needed to be done - simplicity and flexibility of design along with fast loading have always been priorities. We just had to do the odd tweak here and there to cater for known display-idiosyncrasies of various browsers and make a smaller home page available.
The screen-shots on this page show the
Opera
browser displaying pages on a Sony Ericsson P900 mobile 'phone but this
does not imply that only Opera is suitable (or the P900 for
that matter) - that would be contrary to our policy of making sure that
this web-site is accessible using any browser.
However, testing of various browsers on different devices did show that Opera's speed and especially its small-screen rendering were generally superior to that of any other smartphone/PDA browser available at the time of writing. There are versions for most platforms.
Some mobile browsers support frames but, unless you have a
particularly-large screen (or Opera's "frame-select" feature), we
suggest that you disable frames if possible. This should result in the
automatic loading of a much-smaller "no frames" version of the home
page.
If you cannot disable frames or if your browser does not handle the <no frames> tag properly (and, thus, fails to load the page) you should bookmark and use the mobile-index URL.
This will load an even-smaller, text-only, home page (see image above).
In fact, it may be that you will prefer to use the mobile-specific home page instead of the default no-frames version because the former omits links to pages, such as the picture galleries, that you are unlikely to want to access on a mobile device.
A disadvantage of not using frames is, of course, that you lose the navigation side-bar. There is no easy solution to this but the mobile-specific home page shown above does have a series of navigation buttons at the bottom and almost every page has a "previous-page" button (although the latter does require that your browser be able to handle JavaScript).
To make things easier, you can also bookmark the
this-week
(see image left) and
next-week
URLs which will give direct access to the pages you are most likely to
want - the listings for the current week and the
following week respectively.
Note that the Opera browser has been set to its "fit-to-page" mode - any page-width settings in the HTML code are largely ignored and the page is formatted for the screen-size in use so there is no need for a horizontal scrollbar.
Browsers that do not provide the "fit-to-page" facility will probably require scrolling to reveal any text alongside an image but the main session-listings should still appear on the left of the screen.
And that, naturally, raises the question of graphics - particularly for
the reviews. To load or not to load ...
The full display (below left) is certainly attractive and readable and the review-page images are usually smaller than 10 KBytes. But, with GPRS costs being what they are, you will probably want to disable the automatic loading of images.
Your browser should then display just the descriptive "ALT" text that is included for every image on this site (below right) so you'll know what would be there with a full display.
That text will also indicate if a link is associated with the image. Any such link should work in the normal fashion.
And that's all there is to it!
We hope that the "mobile" site will be useful to you and we would welcome
feedback.
Let us know of any suggestions for improvements or if anything doesn't
work as you think it should (perhaps with a particular browser).
Incidentally, Astor listings are also available on Telstra's WAP service. However, you would not be able to access the actual web-site and it would probably be more expensive than using GPRS because WAP charges are on a connect-time rather than a data-volume basis.